Product Description

IT’S LAURIE NOTARO’S HOLIDAY HANDBOOK.
PREPARE TO LAUGH YOUR TINSEL OFF.

It’s the most wonderful–and most dreadful–season of the year, when boxes of truffles attack your thighs, drunken holiday revelers stay long past their welcome, and your grandmother has conniptions at the department store over the price of hand lotion. Welcome to Laurie Notaro’s Christmastime.

In ten brand-new stories and three previously published favorites, Notaro shares the sidesplitting daily disasters of the holidays, like finding herself on emergency feminine product recon at midnight on Christmas Eve; surrendering to the inevitable Horrible Gift Parade by simply asking for holiday dish towels and giant white underpants from Sears; battling the morons in line at the Seventh Circle of Hell, otherwise known as the do-it-yourself craft store; and trying to live down her reputation as the Most Unfun Christmas Party Guest Ever, due to an unfortunate misunderstanding involving a fake overdose and emergency paramedics.

So whether you find yourself at the Dull and Smart Party or the Raucous and Stupid Party this holiday season, you’ll always know where to find Laurie–just follow the chocolate trail over to the cheese platter. She’ll be the one dialing the cops.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #764200 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-01
• Released on: 2005-11-01
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 160 pages

Amazon.com Review
Like her other titles, Laurie Notaro's An Idiot Girl's Christmas is a bon bon of a book--one that is so honestly observed that, if you are at work, you will find yourself sneaking in time to read it at your desk in the middle of the day, snorting with laughter. There are few writers who can nail the particular humiliation of, say, buying a box of tampons in a crowded store while a small cadre of punks makes unfortunate jokes behind you. Or who can let loose the funny fury of wrong-headed Christmas gifts, such as her mother's peculiar affinity for food-scented candles:

Always on my list is a scrumptious delicacy from my mother's favorite Wax Candle Baked Goods store. I don't know where my mother found a wax store that specializes in baked-goods and pastry candles, but she did. Good job Mom!…It's the perfect diet food, because biting into one is like biting into Jennifer Lopez's double-decker ass at Madam Tussaud's, kind of like sinking your teeth into a thick, dense bar of Irish Spring--without the flavor.

With some new and some best-of material (the venerable Jingle Bell piece about a Barney-obsessed neighbor is here), this volume covers many a family holiday at the Notaro household, with an amusing assortment of ill-adjusted siblings, in-laws, and that grand dame of dysfunction and buzz kill, Notaro's mother. Or at least the ever-so-lightly fictionalized version of Notaro's mother, who plays the foil to Notaro's perpetually underfunded, tortured, and sweetly Machiavellian self. The palpable and universal mother-daughter tension in their relationship is best mined in the chapter, "Oh Holy Night," or "The Year I Ruined Christmas," in which the n'er do well's daughter purse is lost, found, and returned home with a tire track across it and without Notaro herself:

"I was dead?" I asked my mother eagerly, trying hard to fight the urge to jump up and down in glee. "Oh my God. I can't believe it. This is fantastic. Did you cry?"

"Well, almost," my mother confessed. "But then again there was the relief of getting the second use out of your prom dress."

In the end, wit and clever revenge on dull party guests trump the rich, thin, and conventionally pretty girls every time. Notaro's Idiot Girl's Christmas is a holiday worth celebrating. --Megan Halverson

From Publishers Weekly
Humorist Notaro (Autobiography of a Fat Bride; We Thought You'd be Prettier) takes on the standard fare of holiday horrors in this slim volume of essays, rejuvenating well-worn territory with gonzo humor and a few touches of sentiment. Notaro proffers up an ironic gift list ("Of course, I would enjoy more than anything getting some really cheap bath crystals, so I could use them when I take a shower since I don't have a bathtub") and skewers the horrors of December shopping ("a woman who had gone to high school with Mary Todd Lincoln moved up to the counter"), but also recounts some peculiar, Notaro family-specific stories, like the year the author (sort of) died and was resurrected on Christmas Eve, or the year the family ate raisin-resembling maggots with Christmas dinner. Understated emotion (tempered with sarcasm) is Notaro's secret strength, whether remembering her late grandfather's Christmas Eve walks, or taking her Nana shopping: "She's like a toddler but one who won't respond to the store PA system calling her name unless the speaker is approximately two inches from her left, good ear." Fans of David Sedaris's Holidays on Ice will find this worth a look.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Laurie Notaro loves Christmas, despite the fact that last year she was the unfortunate recipient a jar of previously owned bath salts and an XXL sweater with a snowman on it. She does not adhere to the saying “It’s the thought that counts” when the thought is “If I clean it off and put a bow on it, she won’t know I used this,” but she does think it’s funny to call out on the Holy Night, “Ho ho ho and a bottle of rum!” because it makes her mother mad. This is her fifth book.

Customer Reviews

Christmas Shopping With Laurie
As a late arrival to the Laurie Notaro fanwagon (I didn't discover her until her third book), I got off to a slow start, finding her humor too confrontational at times, and too self-abasing at other times. Still, I found myself hunting down her previous books, and before I knew what had hit me, I was laughing and reading bits out loud to savor them.

My favorite Notaro pieces all seem to involve shopping. In An Idiot Girl's Christmas, the standout essays are Deck the Mall, in which Laurie takes her Nana Christmas shopping, and Have Yourself a Kmart Little Christmas, in which Laurie finds herself in a crowded Super Kmart just before closing time on Christmas Eve.

In another chapter, The Most Unfun Christmas Party Hostess Ever, we get an intriguing glimpse of Laurie's husband (although we still don't know his name). As they get their house ready for a Christmas party, unnamed husband asks "Do you think if I put my new Emily Dickinson biography on the coffee table that it will spur conversation?" Apparently, in his circle of friends, this is a distinct possibility. Laurie knows her friends, on the other hand, will "debate whether or not I know that I married a gay man."

An Idiot Girl's Christmas is a pretty short book, 142 pages in a hardcover the size of a trade paperback, but it's priced accordingly, and you'll definitely get your money's worth in laughs.

Lively, fun, and of course...Self decimating
In true Laurie style, this book will make you feel better about your worst Christmas memory. Because inevitably, hers is worse. Way worse.

A really quick read (I picked it up after work yesterday...took it to the gym...and was finished before dinner) but fun and entertaining throughout. There is no filler in this short, but sweet book. Just lots of Laurie's unique humor encapsulated in bite sized Christmas stories of true horror. My favorite I think being the Super K-mart at midnight on Christmas Eve story.

If you've read and liked ANY of her previous work...this book should be on your Christmas list...hopefully positioned above the puffy Christmas dish towels and nylon underwear large enough to cover a sports car in a downpour.

Funny, wonderful, great read
Notaro keeps getting better with age--I loved this book, read it in a night despite my best efforts to ration myself to a chapter a night--and am now re-reading it for a second time. I always consider Laurie's books multiple-use, anyway, I've read all of her books two and three times. I was happy to see some old favorites in An Idiot Girl's Christmas, but happier to see the new material, particularly the closing chapter, which was a departure from her usual stuff and works marvelously and had me laughing outloud until I couldn't breathe. Always hilarious, always relateable (I too, am a clear light Christmas tree person), always truthfull, I will advise any readers of this book to follow the rules of the previous books: don't read in public unless you want people to doubt your sanity, and don't imbibe or eat unless you want to become a Diet Pepsi fountain (laughing and liquid intake to do not mix). This is a great fifth installment in my Notaro collection, and I will treasure it for every holiday season to come, and it has also provided me with something to give to every one of my girlfriends (especially the ones who are impossible to buy for). Thanks, Laurie!